Meet the Wonderful Robot Who Can Follow Traffic Rules

12/19/2018 2:55:12 PM

The Engineers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a special robot. The robot is autonomous and it can keep pace with foot traffic. It has the ability to observe the general social codes that pedestrians follow. The robot is very helpful to avoid oncoming obstacles while still keeping a steady walking pace.

The researchers who have designed this robot will present the paper at the IEEE Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems to be held in Vancouver, Canada, this September. The robot resembles a knee- high kiosk on wheels and was able to avoid collisions while keeping average flow of pedestrians in test drives. The lead author of the study is Yu Fan (Steven) Chen.

Yu Fan said that socially aware navigation is the main strength for mobile robots that operated in environments that require instant interactions with pedestrians. Chen also said that small robots could function on sidewalks for package and food delivery.